LAGOS, Nigeria (VOICE OF NAIJA) — I’m going to hit you and shake you a little bit. You’re all aware, I believe, of the struggles we occasionally face as creative people.
I wanted to reveal to you what takes place when you don’t exercise your creativity. As I meet a lot of people, I frequently discover this. I don’t understand why they don’t allow themselves to be expressive but rather restrict their creativity, as I believe they are creative in some way.
They put it off and promise to do it someday, or they claim they weren’t made to be that kind of person. But give excuses like “you know, now that I have a real job, I can’t do that any more.”
Although numerous drawbacks prevent us from achieving our goals, we simply choose to put them on the back burner.
As a result, I decided to share this post about what happens when you choose to ignore these setbacks. Ignoring this incredibly important aspect of yourself has a cost, don’t you think? That’s why I titled this article, “What Happens If You Don’t Have Creativity.”
The ability to be creative is ingrained in everyone of us from birth. So many people I talk to claim that they create things just out of a need to paint, make jewelry, create movies, write books, or create music. It’s impossible for them to resist. It’s a fundamental drive for an uncontrollable impulse; they must create things.
Nevertheless, I also come across a lot of people who are able to suppress that urge and instead shuffle back and forth in their comfort zone, never changing a single day. In an effort to avoid conflict with the outside world, they make snap judgments about who they are, what they are capable of, and what they have to do.
They make decisions that they believe will keep other people from being upset, startled, or disappointed with them. Many people are scared to express their creativity out of concern for what others may think, yet deep inside, a flame flickers that represents their dream or the thing they would truly like to do.
They’ve already made up their minds that they can’t, despite having the necessary time, talent, education, equipment, money, support, and freedom. They enclose that tiny spark in a metal box in an effort to permanently suffocate it. They continue with their duties and responsibilities, but the ember won’t go out; instead, it heats up the metal box, making them feel that desire once more. Because it’s enclosed in a box, the heat intensifies into a burning pain.
They then grab an anesthetic. Our society is rife with anesthetics, narcotics, alcohol, junk foods, television, popular culture, and social media, all of which encourage selfishness, anger, and destructive behavior. There are countless ways to keep us from experiencing it in the present moment and from connecting with our genuine selves, including stereotyping people we encounter, feeling pressured or afraid, and being unable to perceive things clearly and fully.
We move quickly through life, eager to move on to the next thing and unable to enjoy the present. We spend our lives as if it were a checklist, checking off experiences like they were chores, being too attached to our beliefs, and being unable to handle the unexpected. We appear disoriented and disinterested, unable to hear what our loved ones are saying, and always absorbed with some other situation or moment.
Strangely, while our culture likes to portray visual artists as dreamers, individuals who suppress their creativity are the ones genuinely trapped in a nightmare dream state. A visual artist is someone who has a keen sense of reality. Creativity isn’t simply making stuff up; it’s seeing and feeling the universe with such clarity that you can draw connections and recognize patterns that serve to explain reality. It implies that you embrace the beauty of the world rather than trying to run away from it, isn’t it?
If you have the urge to create something, don’t overthink it, don’t over-prepare, don’t ask for approval, and don’t wait for feedback from others. Instead, open that metal box, blow on that ember, add kindling, and let it burn. What we actually want is to be true to ourselves, but what if that’s not what the rest of the world wants? You know, it’s simpler to change who we are, and our society is full of ideas and people who don’t always approve of how others live their lives.
What else can you do? You can try to alter who you are, try to hide who you are, protest, or fight. Yet, in the end, all that’s required of you is that you stay true to who you are and find a way to use your drive for creativity constructively. It just means you need to take a little time to let that little ember come out of the metal box. This does not necessarily mean you have to leave your job or all of your friends.
Also, there are countless actions you can take to reduce the stress associated with not being true to who you really are and your true nature. Because I had these ideas in my head regarding the things we go through and I didn’t know where to turn for answers, I decided to write this blog in order to prove to myself that I could. I decide to look for them myself, and before long, I find them.
Someone might say, “The problem with not thinking highly of my creativity is that I just don’t appreciate it and that it’s not unique enough.”
I think there are a lot of things that will make us feel that way. This is also true; we can say what I do isn’t special, or I’ve seen other people do the same stuff, or I can’t come up with an idea that nobody else has had before.
Yet, whether your creativity is unique in the world is really unimportant; what matters is if it is unique in your life. Your passion for it is something that needs to be let out because it matters to you, fills you with fulfillment, and you like doing it. It will be judged by a myriad of factors both inside and outside of you before it ever has a chance to be born. You know that some people will stifle it by telling you that you’re not talented enough, that you lack creativity, or that they don’t think it’s worth the money.
All of those things are irrelevant; what matters is that you use your power and that you put this talent you possess to use. It’s possible that your first attempt won’t be very good, that other people won’t be impressed by it, or that it won’t be valuable in the marketplace, but the only way to get there, if that is truly your goal and what matters to you, is to do it and keep doing it.
So keep making things, even if you want to toss what you’ve created into the garbage; instead, store it in a drawer or box. You can’t judge anything today because you don’t know if you’ll look at it again in the future and decide that it is beautiful.
But it’s more crucial to make a bad creative piece than none, particularly if you know deep down that you’re a creative person. We are all capable of doing this, but we might not be very good at it. Yet we can still take action, and the more we do it, the more adept we’ll become.
Thank you for reading.